I am an internationally produced playwright. My work has been performed across the UK, in New Zealand, Canada,and in the USA. This is true despite the fact that I have never been paid for my writing, or indeed, had a play produced in a theatre by anyone other than myself.

The National Theatre’s revival of Scenes from an Execution is the first time Howard Barker, 66, has been produced at Britain’s premier venue. He has complained of a ‘conspiracy’ against his work in this largest subsided house, and in an interview with Mark Lawson on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row he argued, that the choice of Scenes from an Execution was in some ways unsurprising as it is an essentially ‘conservative’ play, written before the majority of his more radical ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’, where meaning is shattered into subjectivity, and where we experience theatre individually, and perhaps painfully. His grumpy approach to thanking the directors of the National for reviving his work aside, Barker’s Scenes from an Execution shines on the Lyttleton stage. Coming from a playwright with an uneasy relationship with commission and who has struggled to find himself represented in his own country, art resonates with life as we in…

I hate to do this.

(The following 'mini opera' is a submission for the 2012 ENO Mini Operas Script Competition.)

(The following 100-word play was displayed in the Royal Court Theatre Bar during the 2012 Young Writers Festival.)